Books & Authors

Yesterday you met Genevieve Valentine, one of the four folks I’ll be working alongside* on Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture. Today it’s someone I knew (in the Internet sense of the term) prior to this project, unabashed geek and sometimes political commentator Zaki Hasan. Zaki knows his geek stuff. He teaches film, but if you ask me his real passion is in the nerdier (and thus cooler) end of the film spectrum. His commentary on geek films and pop culture is always engaging, and few people dissect a good comic book yarn like Zaki. I’ve enjoyed his online commentary for some time now and am very happy to be working with him. The Book of Geek is out next August and is…Read more

One of the exciting things about Geek Wisdom, which I announced yesterday, is the opportunity to work with some excellent writers. One of them is Genevieve Valentine. She is a regular blogger at Tor.com, probably the most recognizable publisher of science fiction and fantasy, and her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and many others. Her first book, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is coming in 2011 from Prime Books. Oh, and did I mention she is a Work Fantasy Award nominated author? Pretty cool. Genevieve deals in fantasy, steampunk, weird fiction and more. I certainly urge you to check out her website, and of course, to see her work in Geek Wisdom next August and is available for pre-order….Read more

You folks should check out some of these books. They’re self-published by folks I know, but knowing these folks isn’t the point. I wouldn’t be plugging them if they sucked. They don’t suck. These are interesting, unusual, and memorable books worth checking out. Brian Spaeth is a visionary and probably also a lunatic. I would not let him date my daughter, but I would let him give a speech at my funeral. He has some books. The Christmas Bridge – “It’s a timeless excitement fable and that means maybe lessons, and explosions, and emotions, and etc.” LOL, WUT? In The Christmas Bridge, Christmas is outlawed. So, “When charismatic life drifter JESI BURNS and one-time actoring icon NICK KEEGE are tasked by Santa Claus himself to…Read more

Every now and then you stumble across something and think, “Why isn’t this considered a landmark in its field?” Citizen 13660, published in 1946, is one of those things. It’s not quite a comic, but should be hailed among the important works of graphic literature. Somehow, though, despite being an avid comic/graphic novel reader, this has slipped under my radar and the radar of every other fan of the comic medium I know. That’s too bad. This deserves to be widely known in such circles. In 1946, just after spending time in two internment camps, Japanese-American Miné Okubo published an illustrated memoir of her experience. It was called Citizen 13660, after the family number given to her in the camps. The novel/graphic novel hybrid…Read more